Security vendor Trend Micro on Wednesday announced that it has successfully eliminated a Zeus botnet server, otherwise known as a command-and-control (C&C) server, from the Internet. In a blog entry, Senior Threat Researchers David Sancho and Rainer Link wrote that the C&C server was taken offline with the assistance of Domain Name Registrar CDMON in the month of February.

Zeus is a notorious crimeware toolkit armed with sophisticated routines and designed specifically to help cybercriminals steal the credentials in online banking or other financial transactions. While the elimination of a single Zeus C&C server is hardly in the same league as Microsoft's bringing down of the Rustock spam botnet in March, it does give Trend Micro access to valuable information about the compromised hosts.  On this front, IT managers or security administrators interested in the details of Trend Micro's research can take a look at the free white paper titled Sinkholing Botnets (.pdf), also written by Sancho and Link.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at Trend Micro

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